WhirledView

A Two Thumbs Up Beginning: Tom Udall’s Bid for the US Senate is Official

By PHK

In a strong, well-crafted and substantively rich speech at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque earlier today, New Mexican Congressman Tom Udall announced his bid for the US Senate. If today’s well attended, well organized and enthusiastic event is an indication for the future, Udall will be a formidable candidate in a competitive race for a seat that – in New Mexico at least – comes around once in a political life time.

As I review my notes from the speech – as well as those from an earlier Q and A teleconference Udall held with Albuquerque bloggers – it is clear that he understands and articulates clearly the connection between this country’s posture and presence in the world and the domestic and personal needs of the citizens of this country and this state. He sees the interconnectedness between the quagmire that is Iraq – an invasion which he opposed from the get-go and which remains a crucial issue for him - the fatigue and ill-treatment of the patriotic and courageous US military and National Guard by an administration that doesn’t care, the need for renewable energy and capping of carbon emissions for the health of our economy and the planet as well as the requisite demand for better education (No Child Left Behind has major flaws), universal healthcare and more job opportunities for New Mexicans.

Udall is running on his record as well he should – both as a five term Democratic Congressman (CD-3) and
as a previous Attorney General for the state of New Mexico. His work as Attorney General included dramatically reducing deaths on New Mexico’s highways from drunken drivers, and working to reduce high domestic violence rates. As Congressman he supported the most recent Democratic bill in the House of Representatives calling for a redeployment of US troops from Iraq with their final departure by 2008.

Udall also said that he learned as Attorney General that it is possible to be tough on crime without infringing on individual liberties, and as a consequence, he seeks changes in the Patriot Act. Similarly, he argued that it is also possible to be tough on terrorism without the use of torture – which he strongly opposes.

In short, this was an upbeat speech with much substance based on experience and common sense. An excellent beginning for Udall in what portends to be this state’s most significant Elections ‘08 race.

Kudos to Tom Udall and his staff for a very smooth and professional campaign kick-off.

Photos of Tom Udall at his announcement to run for the Senate, November 29 by PHKushlis.

Window on Eurasia

by CKR

Paul Goble has expanded his commentary, "Window on Eurasia," from an e-mail list to a blog.

Paul is one of the best-informed Americans on Estonia in particular, the Baltic States and Russia more generally, and much of the rest of Eurasia.

I've added "Window on Eurasia" to WhirledView's blogroll. Add it to your favorites.

What the Publics Want

by CKR

Public opinion alone isn’t necessarily a good basis for foreign policy, but when it coincides with the opinions of those who have held high posts in the government and those of many professionals, it can be a unifying political force.

That’s the case for sharply decreasing and eventually eliminating nuclear weapons. It’s why I’ve suggested that the Democrats use this issue as a way of distinguishing themselves from what is becoming the war party and indicating to the world that America is still a force for peace. I’m not talking about unilateral disarmament, but negotiated, verified and safeguarded mutual reductions among the nuclear weapon states, just like George Schultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger and Sam Nunn said.

I would be happy to see the Republicans take up this issue, too, but that seems less probable. As we shall see, the Republican electorate is much more favorably inclined toward nuclear weapons than Democrats are.

The Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland has conducted a poll in the United States and Russia on attitudes toward nuclear weapons. By and large, both publics would like to see the numbers of nuclear weapons greatly reduced, even eliminated if safeguards are in place to make sure nobody’s cheating.

By and large, Russians are more suspicious than the Americans; but even there, majorities are for arms reductions. And they likely would get less suspicious if there was movement on the American side.

On to the specifics of the poll.

The Misanthropy State: Don’t Make Too Much of Iowa

By PLS

When all candidates are males, the Iowa caucus process probably serves as a good straw in the electoral wind. But that assumption must be considered gone with the wind, now that the leading Democratic candidate is a woman. It won’t be a fair contest in a miserably misanthropic state.

Iowa has no female Senators. Never has. It doesn’t even have a female Member of Congress. Never has. Iowa has never had a female governor either. Female Lieutenant governors can’t crack the granite ceiling.

Mistrust in female leadership is crumbling throughout the U.S., and it isn’t even a pervasive middle western bias. Iowa’s neighbors manage to elect women to top posts. Kansas and Michigan currently have female governors, for example. As for Senators, there are female incumbents from Michigan, Missouri and Minnesota. In the House Ohio, Minnesota, South Dakota, Wisconsin and Michigan are represented by one or more females. And so on.

This being the case, results from the Iowa caucuses will have to be very carefully analyzed. Obviously, if Hillary Clinton wins big, it will be an extraordinary accomplishment.

If she loses by anything but a humiliating margin, the winning candidates should in no way be considered to represent political preferences in other states or to represent a momentum that can be recapitulated elsewhere. Iowa should not be seen to give any male candidate a lock on the nomination.

In short, journalists who write as if Iowa is a microcosm of the US in 2007 will be doing us all a great disservice.

Will political reporters have the sociological savvy to properly interpret the electoral preferences of this state?

For that matter, to what extent can any of them rise above the unsavory bitch or bimbo stereotypes that women know so well?

Opening the Gates?

By PHK

Can Bob do what Condi and Karen should have done, but didn’t? That’s Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and soon to be former Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy Karen Hughes, of course.

I sure hope so. Why is it that the Defense Secretary seems to be the only person in this administration to see the necessity of this country engaging in “soft” as well as “hard” power and to advocate in a prestigious public forum the need for sufficient resources and requisite structural changes for the US to have a chance of becoming effective abroad again?

The lip service about selling America abroad that has been the mantra of W’s chief occasional-burqa-wearing soon to depart, public relations "guru" Karen Hughes – in comparison – is a bad joke at best, and a nightmare at worst. And if she, Condi, W, Cheney, Henrietta Fore and others think that private corporations, an ineffectual State Department run on the cheap, and just-on-time pay-for-by-the-hour contractors can do what should have been, and still needs to be done, on diplomatic and public diplomacy fronts after years of bipartisan neglect, they’re having yet another oxycodin-inspired dream of the Edgar Alan Poe “Quoth the raven, Nevermore” variety.

Making the case for “soft power”

Meanwhile, thank you Bob Gates. Finally, someone in the administration with enough clout has it right and is willing to say so: US military power now costing nearly one half-trillion dollars per year in comparison with Rice’s $36 billion request for the State Department, is insufficient to successfully project American power and interests abroad.

Sorry guys and gals, tanks, Howitzers and bombs that fall on mostly civilian populations from above do not do it. These lethal “toys” represent the last resort in dispute resolution, not the first, and even then, wars are settled at negotiating tables through peace treaties that stick politically and seemingly intractable interethnic conflicts require patience and considerable expertise to deal with – that is, if one wants to bring and keep the soldiers home and safely away from IEDs.

As Gates told students, faculty and others in the Landon Lecture at Kansas State University on Monday, if the US is “to meet the myriad of challenges around the world in the coming decades, this country must strengthen” elements of national power beyond the military “both institutionally and financially, and create the capability to integrate and apply all of the elements of national power to problems and challenges abroad.” This means “strengthening America’s capacity to use “soft” power and for integrating it with “hard” power.

Tuesday Feeder Blogging and Amaryllis Watch

by CKR

Continuing my efforts at extreme bird closeups...Not so much wind today, but some.

Love the salmon-colored undertail feathers. Just like the wing linings.

This one is a female Western flicker. The males have a red "whisker mark."

Love it when I can see the feather detail. And look at those claws! The second photo is a white-winged dove.

The amaryllis bud stalks have caught up and passed the leaves in length. They are leaning away from the window because I turned the pot around this morning to keep them growing reasonably straight. Here's last week's photo for comparison.

The Five Step Plan to Secure and Happy Homes

By PLS

Some people will do anything to protect a foetus. I find their theology and tactics repugnant, but they have been pretty darned effective in gnawing away at women’s abortion rights. So let’s borrow from the enemy, I say, to protect the family from financial predators.

Families are losing their homes right and left across this great country. This is a terrible threat to family values. A family on the street is a family truly in danger.

Conservatives have already laid the groundwork for this great cause. The Supreme Court has decided that grown women can’t be trusted to make intelligent decisions about their own bodies, and people who otherwise want to keep government out of our lives think they have the right to make reproductive decisions for people they aren’t even related to. It’s one tiny little step to agreeing that lots of people simply don’t have the education or experience to make good decisions about mortgages.

So let’s help the innocents who might be tempted by predatory lenders. I call it the Five Step Plan to Secure and Happy Familyhood:

1. The video: Our video won’t show cute little foetuses, it will show the destitute in extremis. Everyone about to sign up for a subprime loan will have to watch a tear-jerker of a video showing what can happen when you lose your house and can’t declare bankruptcy and your kids can’t go to school because they don’t have a settled address and your teeth drop out for lack of care. Etc. Etc.
2. The picketers: outside every subprime mortgage lending institution let's station aggressive noisy picketers with gruesome signs showing starving kids and crying mothers and fathers drinking their shame away. Etc. Etc.

3. The Written Warning: before anyone can sign for a subprime loan, he or she must read a precise description of terms and penalties in simple English—and in an easily readable typeface (no squinting allowed) and then pass a test* showing comprehension.
4. The Delay: potential borrowers should be forced to go home and cogitate for at least 24 hours after they receive the warning, during which time the little test can be graded by an incorruptible neutral party.

5. The Legislation: all of these procedures are palliatives. The only way to keep good but naive people from being taken advantage of and ruined is to pass legislation which will outlaw these predatory loans. The sooner such consumer protection legislation can be tested and declared constitutional by the courts the better.

There are of course some conservatives who think that people who sign up for bad mortgages have only themselves to blame, but surely we can count the on the family values lobby to support this initiative. What could be more destructive to family life than losing a home? Oh yes, a little rebalancing of the bankrupcy act to provide more consumer protection would also help.

*This was my bright little idea. It would be a bit of a nuisance, but it sure would help to keep people from signing impetuously, optimistically, foolishly on dotted lines they should avoid.

Kosovo: Nearing the end of the road?

By PHK

The diplomatic impasse in the Balkans over Kosovo predicted last summer will soon be upon us. Did anyone really think that a breakthrough would occur when the negotiations between recalcitrant Serbs and equally recalcitrant Kosovars resumed last August – this time under senior EU diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger - over the future status of the fiercely contested region in the heart of the Balkan Peninsula?

Not as far as I know

Will Kosovo again burst into flames if and when the newly elected Kosovar government declares independence as many predict after December 10, the deadline that ends the current stalemated talks, arrives? And then what?

In 1991 when Yugoslavia was fast on its way to becoming the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, US Secretary of State James Baker proclaimed that the US did not have "a dog in that fight." Not long after, wars broke out between Serbs and Slovenes, Serbs and Croats and Serbs and Bosnians as the country broke apart. The Serbian fight with the Slovenes lasted less than a week, but the other struggles were bitterer and far longer lasting. The Europeans at the time had neither the military force nor the will to separate the protagonists effectively.

The Germans and the Austrians recognized Slovenian and Croatian independence several months before the US did and have been blamed ever since for instigating Yugoslavia’s violent unraveling. From what I remember at the time, however, the tinderbox that was Yugoslavia under ultra-Serb nationalist Slobodan Milosevic would have exploded regardless.

Also, from what I remember, the US went out of its way to find a peaceful solution to the recognition issue. The George H. W. Bush administration had no interest in opening this Pandora’s Box. Finally when it did recognize Slovenian and Croatian independence in March 1992 followed in April by recognition of the more problematic Bosnian bid, it did so but reluctantly. By that time Baker was gone from State and Lawrence Eagleburger, a career US diplomat who had served in Belgrade early in his career and if anything saw Yugoslavia through Serbian eyes, was instrumental in that fateful decision. But was there a real alternative? I don’t think so.

As for the Soviet Union, that then spinning apart behemoth, was far too preoccupied with its own future existence and loss of empire to care – or at least do anything about the trouble in the Balkans. Although this had changed by 1999 when the Russian Federation came to Milosevic’s defense for strategic reasons but then ultimately backed down when then President Yeltsin outmaneuvered and replaced Yevgeniy Primakov, his hardline anti-western foreign minister.

That was then and this is now

Is the Serbian government foremost Russia’s surrogate and Kosovo’s that of the US as Humphrey Hawksley of the BBC argued recently? Is this to become another violent skirmish between two small surrogates – pre-Cold War style – in the heart of the Balkans?

Should the international community be worried about potential Albanian irredentism and the possible formation of a “greater Albania” as some have argued, or is this another canard thrown up by the Serbs and their allies to impede the continued, and perhaps, finale of the disintegration of Yugoslavia that began in 1991?

Whose Laws?

by CKR

The New York Times today brings us another blast in the ongoing war against science by a small subset of those who call themselves religious. It’s a version of the accusation of “you’re doing it too.” This starts out as a particularly weak argument and proceeds to a fundamental misunderstanding of science.

If what is being done is wrong or procedurally unacceptable, accusing another of doing it too may weaken his case, but it doesn’t bolster one’s own case.

What is alleged is that science an arbitrary belief system, just like religion. The attacker then goes on (he thinks) to show that science (or scientists, not the same thing) is unwilling to examine its assumptions, just like religion. Why someone thinks it is a good thing to be an adherent of an arbitrary belief system that is unwilling to examine its assumptions is beyond me, but that’s in the realm of psychology and I’d rather stay with philosophy.

So let’s look at the claims in the Times article.

All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.

…to be a scientist, you had to have faith that the universe is governed by dependable, immutable, absolute, universal, mathematical laws of an unspecified origin.

The idea that the laws exist reasonlessly is deeply anti-rational.

The trouble with these claims is that they have science backwards. It appears that the author was exposed to poor science teachers and never got over it.

Tracking or Not?

by CKR

I'm just wondering how consistent this is with this.

Apparently cell phones can be used to track drug dealers but not those who need 911 help. Or is this another of those governmental myths? We might be able to track people via their cellphones, so we need to press the legal system as far as possible, so that we've kept that legal channel open? And oh by the way we need to say that tracking, like those mythological liquid explosives, really works.

Or is it a regional thing that works better in some places than others? With certain cell phones?